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Tuesday, June 24, 2014

Vincenzo Bilof's Guide to Books & Booze

Time to grab a book and get tipsy!

Back by popular demand, Books & Booze, originally a mini-series of sorts here on TNBBC challenges participating authors to make up their own drinks, name and all, or create a drink list for their characters and/or readers using drinks that already exist.

Today, Vincenzo Bilof assigns each of the main characters from his books a drink. Bottoms up!

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“Let’s have
a drink somewhere.” The sentence may imply a lot of different things, from a
sexual encounter to resolving a conflict with your nemesis. In fiction,
characters who don’t abuse alcohol may often use a drink or two for the same
purposes, and we figure that if the author included a scene in a bar, well,
then, it’s important. Every word is important. Think about the scene in X-Men: First Class when Xavier and
Magneto attempt to recruit Wolverine in a bar. That’s a great scene. We get one
line from Wolverine…

If our
characters are going to use alcohol, then it must be purposeful; characters who
smoke or drink are in these situations where they use substances because it
suits their character or drives the plot forward. A lot of convenient and
inconvenient things happen in a bar (especially if you’re playing Dungeons and Dragons). But what if we
take these characters outside of their fictional world? Would their “beverage
of choice” say something about who they are? Here are some characters from my
novels who might like a drink or two…

The heroine
in this book, Amparo Vega, is a hard, damaged woman. She loves guns, sex, and
blowing things up. She’s a mercenary whose screwed-up sense of morality is
challenged by zombie violence. She loves to drink; she’ll take shots of hard
liquor over beer, but she’ll settle for anything in a pinch. She’s spent a lot
of time drowning her guilt with bottles of Jack Daniels; someone offered her a
shot of Everclear, or Bacardi 151, she wouldn’t hesitate.

Brian Powers
hates drinking and doing drugs. He’s driving through the Arizona desert in his
van filled with people he loosely associates with; so when he takes his
drug-addicted friends to a deserted town to check out the site of a legendary
comic store where the owner murdered people and decorated the walls with their
skin (and what could go wrong for a bunch of teenagers on such a journey…), he
gives in to peer pressure and drinks Jack Daniels out of the bottle, which is
unfortunately laced with some “extra” stuff. Even though Brian doesn’t like to
party, Jack, Kurt, and Jamie are hard drinkers, and they bring more than a couple
bottles of liquor into the ruins of a ghostly town.

Sake! This
novel takes place in two different timelines (yes, there’s time travel
involved), and since we’re in Japan, somebody has to drink sake… But during the
contemporary segments of the novel, we see the world through the eyes of Edmund
Grant and Morgan Brand, two werewolf hunters with completely different tastes.
Grant will enjoy several cheap beers at a time, even when he’s on the prowl for
a “fleabag.” Brand isn’t much of a drinker; he’s a fast food junkie, and he
loves soda. If Morgan had to choose, he’d go with a mixed drink, but he’d much
rather just crack open a bag of Doritos.

The
protagonist (who is nameless) in this poetry-narrative is a
narcoleptic-amnesiac poet with sociopathic tendencies. His wife, Connie, has
given him things to drink and has slipped sleeping pills and ecstasy into his
beverages, but those are on “doctor’s orders,” because our protagonist becomes
the subject of a wild psychological experiment. The poet, when he’s
semi-conscious, enjoys Long Island Iced-Teas while he’s wearing dark sunglasses
in seedy establishments.

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From Detroit, Michigan, Vincenzo Bilof has been called "The
Metallica of Poetry" and "The Shakespeare of Gore". He likes to
think Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and Charles Baudelaire would be proud of his
work. It's possible the ghosts of Roberto Bolano and Syd Barrett are playing
chess at his dining table. Vincenzo is the co-conspirator behind the
"Anti-Poetry" poetry movement. A member of the Horror Writers Association, Vincenzo is
the author of nine novels, including the Zombie Ascension series and Gravity Comics Massacre. A novel written
as a collection of poems, The Horror Show,
is another one of his nonsensical works. When he's not chasing his kids around the house or
watching bad horror films, he reads and reviews horror fiction, though his
tastes are more literary. Forthcoming projects include the horror-satire Vampire Strippers from Saturn, and the
meta-fictional novella, Vincenzo Bilof
Must Die. He hopes that all of his readers are aged 18+. You can check out
his blog here: http://vincenzobilof.blogspot.com/

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Who's That Girl?

I have been buried beneath small press and self-published review copies since 2009. My passion for supporting the small press and self publishing communities has driven me out into the world wide web to demonstrate alternative ways to spread the word about amazing publishers, authors, and novels you might never had heard of. Feeding your reading addiction, one book at a time.